The Brief

Summer is in full swing, which means so are many of the ants, bees, and other bugs in our backyards and, well, pretty much everywhere.

While you can rush to your local pest control company for various chemicals, baits, and insecticides after a bug catches you by surprise, there’s also plenty of steps you can take at home to keep them at bay and away from your living space.

Plus, it can also be an opportunity to learn more about the smaller-scale wildlife we’re sharing the city with.

Here’s some tips for handling the six-legged summer rush.

Why do we seem to see more bugs this time of year?

Insects, like some humans, are more active in warmer weather.

Brian Brown, the former curator of entomology at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County for more than 30 years, told LAist they’re typically looking for food, matching with a mate, or migrating.

“What limits insects in our area is water, because it's so dry around here,” he said. “So things like the Argentine ants come into houses looking for water often.”

But because most bugs don’t live that long, Brown said they’re cramming in all those life-sustaining steps at the same time as they reach adulthood.

Their insect instincts are also partly to blame.

They’re naturally drawn to light areas, Brown noted, which can cause them to crowd around windows and interior spaces.

“We take advantage of that when we put out insect traps that we have, like the Malaise traps we've used in people's backyards, that insects fly into and then they just move up to the top of the trap,” he said. “Inside houses — they're like big, huge insect traps if you leave your doors open.”

Tips for keeping bugs at bay

Alan Travis, branch manager with Wise Pest Control based in Old Town Pasadena, inspects a hallway for insects.

(

Courtesy Wise Pest Control

)

Alan Travis, branch manager for Wise Pest Control in Pasadena, told LAist that the summer season into late September is their busiest time for business.

“It's very hot, it's very arid, it's very dry, and you know, we have a multitude of pests emerging,” he said.

They’ve been getting a lot of calls for hornets, wasps, and other stinging insects as well as American roaches, which Travis noted like to crawl in through windows, doors, and baseboards.

However, he said there’s a lot of DIY remedies you can do if you’re not a big fan of sharing your space with them.

What to do for outdoor spaces

For the outside areas, keep moisture to a minimum, Travis said. That means making sure your hoses aren’t dripping, spigots are shut tight, and any old fountains or unused pools aren’t soaking in standing water.

“If you can eliminate that, you'll eliminate 99% of your issues when it comes to pests,” he said.

Take a close look at the foliage around your property. Vines creeping up the walls or a tree leaning into the roof can very quickly become a “superhighway for just about anything from roof rats all the way down to ants,” he added.

What to do about them inside

For indoors, keeping your sinks wiped out, bathtubs clean, and food residue to a minimum should help.

“One of the biggest conducive conditions that I see in people's homes when they have German roaches is the hood that sits above the stove is just covered in grease,” Travis said.

And while you might not be able to seal up every single small crack and crevice around your home, limiting the routes from the outside and making sure there’s not much to attract insects on the inside can make a big difference.

Learning to live together

With that being said, not many bugs in the L.A. area are really dangerous to people.

Widow spiders are certainly the exception, and structurally speaking, termites, too. But aside from those, Brown said he wouldn’t be in a big hurry to get rid of any other insects “unless there were huge numbers of them.”

If you want to try to keep them away from the inside of your home, consider creating an outdoor insect area instead.

For example, drilling holes into a block of wood will attract native bees into your backyard, which he added you can see for yourself at the Natural History Museum’s Nature Gardens.

“It always amazes me that when I show people insects, at first they might be scared, but after they learn a little bit about them, they become so interested, so animated,” Brown said. “Once you learn something about an insect, and you see them everywhere, and you start to understand that they are part of the environment, and there are not all things that you want to get rid of.”

What to do if you still can’t stand it

Whether it’s a single spider in the kitchen or a thousand roaches in the roof, calling a pest control company depends on your own personal threshold for cohabitating with crawlers.

“Some people are OK with a couple of ants on the counter to wipe them off and kind of go about their day,” Travis said. “And then, you know, we'll get the other side of the spectrum where they see one roach crawling up the wall and they're ready to burn the house down and move.”

Edward Oueilhe, general manager of Wise Pest Control, told LAist that it can be quite difficult to know where to turn when you’re anxious about antennaed roommates.

Reviews can be deceiving, he said, so pay attention to how a company communicates.

“A lot of folks in this industry, they'll provide a service and then, you know, for lack of a better way to phrase it, they may disappear,” Oueilhe said.

He recommends making sure a pest control company is responsive, has reasonable availability, and would be willing to follow up if another insect intruder pops up a few days later.

“Make sure that the company is going to take care of you,” Oueilhe said. “More importantly, when they say they're going to do something, they do it.”